Chris Selley: Sobriety may be a long way off for Rob Ford, but leave of absence will help campaign

Well, better astonishingly late than never. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is taking the temporary leave of absence he should have taken, if he wasn’t willing to take a permanent one, so very many months ago. We are to believe he is getting help for … everything, hopefully. But when the news broke Wednesday night, it was at first a confusing proposition.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will be taking an extended leave of absence to seek help for substance abuse, his lawyer confirmed Wednesday night, within hours of the emergence of a second video purporting to show the Mayor smoking cracked cocaine.

Mr. Ford “realizes he needs help for substance abuse,” Ford lawyer Dennis Morris said Wednesday night, but would not specify which substance his client is seeking treatment for.

“In my eyes, he should announce those steps to the public in the near future,” he said.

Reportedly captured early Saturday morning at Mr. Ford’s sister’s house, the new video apparently shows the Toronto mayor taking a drag of what appears to be crack cocaine from a “long copper-coloured pipe.”

It has occurred to me more than once that one of Rob Ford’s better re-election strategy choices might be to not campaign. Over the course of the 2010 race I can’t recall witnessing Mr. Ford score, or lose, a single significant point in a debate — except by not freaking out Hulk-style like everyone expected him to, I suppose. But in 2010 he probably did have to be there. As a political phenomenon, Rob Ford has always been less a person than an idea — or rather a canvas onto which voters can project ideas. He is the idea that he has saved Toronto taxpayers $1-billion when no one else could, for example. His physical presence can’t really bolster that, I don’t think.

Still, the time for an absentee campaign seemed to have passed. Mr. Ford might not have been hugely visible thus far, but the election is months away yet; he seemed to be in it to win it. So when the purported cause of his imminent absence was reported to be an audio recording in which he expressed a desire to fornicate vigorously with fellow candidate Karen Stintz, it didn’t make a heck of a lot of immediate sense. Ford Nation seems to be largely OK with people saying terrible things in pubs.

Indeed, the quote seemed to play well into the Tragic Pennypincher persona some of Mr. Ford’s supporters still seem willing to support: “I’d like to f—–g jam her [Stintz], but she doesn’t want … I can’t talk like this … I’m so sorry,” the Toronto Sun reported him saying in an audio recording at an Etobicoke watering hole on Monday night. “I forgot there’s a woman in the house.”

Look at the remorse! On his off hours, Ford Nation might muse, he can’t help himself. But at least when he shows up for work, he’s fighting for the taxpayer.

Bar-going Torontonians know that at any moment, they could find themselves in the bizarre situation of exchanging drunken banter with their chief executive.

Monday night, this happened to the patrons of Etobicoke’s Sullie Gorman’s, a bar just across the street from the home of Mayor Rob Ford’s mother and adjacent to a municipal park named after the mayor’s father.

An anonymous patron surreptitiously captured audio of the evening and passed it to the Toronto Sun, who posted it online in an edited six-minute audio file.

After careful examination, the National Post provides this transcript of the recording. In only a matter of minutes, Mr. Ford can be heard disparaging mayoral opponents, expressing his curious support for the Green Party and delivering a shotgun blast of Italian racial slurs.

The penny dropped minutes later when it emerged The Globe and Mail had seen another video of Mr. Ford smoking “what has been described as crack-cocaine by a self-professed drug dealer” — apparently in his troubled sister Kathy’s basement late Friday night, and in the company of Sandro Lisi, his lowlife former driver who has been charged with extortion in relation to the first reported video of Mr. Ford smoking crack.

A recent video of Mr. Ford in Mr. Lisi’s company at his beloved Steak Queen greasy spoon in Etobicoke had suggested something even darker than chemical dependency. It suggested that he didn’t give a single measly crap what anyone thought of him — that despite promises to and pledges to have cleaned up his act, he was still willing to pal around in public with the living symbols of his unsuitability for office.

Ford Nation is demonstrably willing to tolerate lying. But he might only get one chance at sloughing off the Ultimate Lie — that he doesn’t smoke crack, that the Toronto Star was lying about having seen a video proving he does smoke crack, that he doesn’t smoke crack anymore and is busy every day getting clean in the gym. Another denial wouldn’t work. Maybe, the Ford campaign reasoned, a leave of absence was finally in order.

His disappearance is more likely to help than hurt his campaign, I think — the longer the better, really. Brother Doug spoke for his brother as mayor; he can just as easily speak for him as candidate. But his re-election already seemed highly unlikely. As unsympathetic a character as Rob Ford is, I still hope against hope this is the real thing, or at least a start. Sobriety seems to be a long way off for the man. But there must be an awful lot of room for improvement between here and sobriety.